EDITOR'S NOTE: Time for Mississippi to Get Smarter on Crime

Within a week of my reports in the JFP and The Guardian about that glaring disparity going viral, U.S. Attorney Mike Hurst had assembled heavily armed members of 15 agencies to swarm Jackson decidedly looking for gang members of all hues.
Photo by Imani Khayyam.

Dozens of officers from 15 federal, state and local law-enforcement agencies gathered in a circle in front of the new colorful Jackson mural facing State Street meant to symbolize a better capital city. The Clarion-Ledger's cops reporter was invited to join the nighttime gang hunters with her video camera.

The videos the reporter later posted may not have included interviews of family members of the 45 people arrested that night, or with the man whose face she filmed pressed to a porch with a cop sitting on top of it, or with violence and gang experts around the country who would tell her, and local cops and political leaders here if they asked, that this "surge" is exactly the wrong way to go about making our communities safer.

U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions and President Donald Trump adore these kinds of old-school arrest sweeps, especially when used against people of color—which they usually are in America, even in states that have high numbers of white gang members and other criminals.

U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions' Project EJECT is a controversial blast from the past.

If that is true—and it could be considering the growth of Simon City Royals, Aryan Brotherhood, Latin Kings (many are white, I'm told), biker gangs like the Bandidos and others—it means that the gang hunters are still targeting a lot of black people. Within a week of my reports in the JFP and The Guardian about that glaring disparity going viral, U.S. Attorney Mike Hurst had assembled heavily armed members of 15 agencies to swarm Jackson decidedly looking for gang members of all hues.

In his press conference, Hurst made a point to mention the Royals, the ABs and other white gang members rounded up in Jackson, and the Ledger cops reporter was sure to include images of white people arrested in her PR videos for the raid that really could be used as warrior cop recruitment. She even showed an officer in Army green with an AR-15 patch on his shoulder, holding a mugshot of a white suspect.

But don't let all the posturing obscure the key point. This should not be a race to round up and film more white gang members just to prove law enforcement aren't racist (and it doesn't prove that anyway). Bad policing is bad policing even if you throw more white mugshots on the pile.

It's a fallacy to believe a traditionally racist-plus-bad policy is suddenly a smart one or no longer racist just because officials apply them to more white people. No, that just means more whites are victims of the practices that actually make them more likely to commit worse crimes.

Much is written about the "warrior" mindset in policing. Sometimes, such as with Diallo's killers, it's hard to know which side of the gang fight is the most violent. And that should not ever be the case with the ones professing to be the good guys.

What good cops, and their leaders, do is constantly welcome new information about what works and what doesn't. Study. Train. Retrain. Question practices. It's the same thing I've done both in the craft of journalism, and it's the same thing I do to know what I know about crime policies. I read long evidence-based reports, talk to the best criminologists and crime researchers in the country, visit cities that are instituting smart policing strategies designed to prevent crime and not increase recidivism and grow gangs by packing more young people into violent prisons without trying to rehabilitate them first.

Those practices are antiquated policing that continue cycles of violence. And it's often done because a) no one has bothered to know any better (and that includes cops reporters) and b) they are doing it for the wrong reasons—votes, racism, meanness, feigned toughness, playing with artillery.